Friday, August 24, 2012

Gob Squad launches new season at REDCAT Sept. 20

REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, launches its new fall season September 20 with the West Coast premiere of Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good). The acclaimed multimedia collective of ingenious artists from the U.K. and Germany playfully deploys an inventive arsenal of live video and performance techniques to celebrate the culture-bending heyday of Andy Warhol's Factory.

Honored with a 2012 Drama Desk award for Unique Theatrical Experience after a successful remount in January at The Public Theater in New York, Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good) makes its Los Angeles debut with performances held Thursday, September 20 through Sunday, September 23, 2012.

"It is exciting to introduce adventurous Los Angeles audiences to Gob Squad," remarks REDCAT executive director Mark Murphy. "These artists are some of the foremost creators of live media-based performance, and their interdisciplinary approach celebrates new possibilities in theatrical forms. Plus, their performances are a riotous good time!"

Utilizing Andy Warhol's films as their starting point, Gob Squad set themselves the task of reconstructing live versions of Warhol films, including the 1965 Edie Sedgwick vehicle Kitchen. Acting out scenes on bare-bones sets, viewed by the audience as black-and-white projections, the shrewdly crafted and frequently hilarious live recreations are spliced with other Warhol celluloid adventures to evoke an elusive, mythic time and place—its hedonistic experimentalism and its wave of social change.

As Gob Squad states:

It's 1965 and everything is just about to happen. Pop, subculture, superstars, feminism, drugs, bright lights, and sex are about to rock the world like never before.

During each performance, Gob Squad engages a few members of the audience, recruiting them to step into various roles in a unique form of audience participation that goes beyond what might be expected. As Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times: "...while I usually find audience involvement an unappealing and overworked cliché, in this case it brings an element of spontaneity and even poetry to the event."

Colliding with the immediate here-and-now to surprising effect, this interactive multimedia event transports the audience to an explosively creative era and unearths the depths beneath the shiny surface of modern life.

"I live my part too – only I can't figure out what my part is in this movie."
—Edie Sedgwick


Gob Squad on Gob Squad:
We make performances and videos which search for beauty in the everyday, and look for words of wisdom from a passing stranger ... We try and explore the point where theatre meets art, media and real life.

Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good)

Performances:

Thursday, September 20 at 8:30 pm

Friday, September 21 at 8:30 pm

Saturday, September 22 at 8:30 pm

Sunday, September 23 at 7:00 pm

Tickets:

$20–25 general ($16–20 students & members)

Seating is general admission and tickets are available for purchase in-person at REDCAT Box Office, by phone at 213-237-2800, or online at www.redcat.org.


No comments: